


Modify

by Darkdragonforge



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow, Worm - Fandom
Genre: Alien Biology, Alien Technology, Gen, Original Character(s), no taylor hebert
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:26:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27726137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkdragonforge/pseuds/Darkdragonforge
Summary: Ever since I could remember, I have been looking. Around me are a great number of big green things, and even little green things. I am next to one of the big green things with the brown cores. The sky above me is blue most of the time, but it is black or grey during the dark-times, or when the water falls.
Kudos: 4





	1. Brass 1.1

Ever since I could remember, I have been looking. Around me are a great number of big green things, and even little green things. I am next to one of the big green things with the brown cores. The sky above me is blue most of the time, but it is black or grey during the dark-times, or when the water falls.

During the bright-times, there is the yellow-bright, and during the dark-times, there is the white-bright. You can sometimes see the white-bright during the bright-times, but it’s even more full then it is during the dark-times. I’ve been looking for a very long time now. I’ve seen lots of bright-times, and lots of dark-times too.

I like the dark-times more than the bright-times, because the dark times are cold, cool, and sharp, while the bright times are hot, warm, and soft.

I like some soft things, but I don’t like the bright time’s soft things. The bright time’s soft things are big and try to rip parts of my shiny shell off with their hard mouths.

They make loud creaky noises, but they stop making those noises when I bite them. They stop moving too, but usually the dark-time sharp things will drag them away after a few bright and dark-times pass. Sometimes the soft things are too quick, but I usually bite them faster than they fly away.

The worst part about biting bright-time soft things is the red stuff. It’s always warm, and smells like iron, and I like iron, but I can’t absorb much from the red stuff. The worst part is when it dries. It always sticks all over me, and I have to wait until it falls off, or until the water falls from the sky.

Maybe I could make it fall off faster if I moved, but I doubt it. I am not good at moving. My limbs are short and smooth. They do not grip to the ground very well, and I am not strong or fast enough to move despite this.

I know that if I ate more metal, then I could make new, better limbs, but I find myself stuck without metal. I am, however, making slow progress. With the red-stuff iron, I am making a spike on one of my three limbs. When it becomes long enough, I can drag myself forward, and maybe find more metal to make more limbs and spikes.

I hope my spike grows fast. If I keep biting one soft thing every two bright-times, then the spike will be done in only forty bright-times. It is not the shaping that takes a long time, but the harvesting of metal. I wish I had more metal, and I have an idea to get some faster than from soft things.

Sometimes, I’ll see one of those big things. I see them at bright-times and dark-times. They don’t usually see me though.

The big things always vary in size. Sometimes I’ll see the small-big things. They always move sloppily, but fairly quickly. It makes me wonder if I’m fast enough to bite one, but they’ve always left long before they see me.

The other size is different. I don’t see them as frequently, but when I do, it’s the same ones. One of them has long black soft stuff coming out of its head, while the other’s head is covered in short yellow soft stuff. They usually sit on a fallen brown core and stay there speaking at each other. I don’t understand all the noises they make, but I can usually understand after thinking on it.

I learned what I am called from them! Long-black noticed me once, pointed with one of their long limbs and noised at me “Look, a piece of scrap metal.”

I don’t know what a scrap is, but I know when a big thing says something, and then pauses, they are describing the thing said before the pause, thus I am described as “a piece of scrap metal”.

I am called Look, and it is a good thing to be called. It is short and has a good sound when it is spoken. Look has a very sharp end when said. My mouth cannot speak, but perhaps I could make it speak with more metal.

I tried spinning my limbs to make long-yellow pay more attention to me, but they didn’t seem to notice me. Even though it was dark-time, it made me feel very hot inside. I don’t like feeling hot, it always makes my core go foggy and then all I want to do is bite.

Foggy is another word I learned. One bright-time, there was a lot of water-air, and short-yellow noised, “Jeez, sure is foggy right now, huh?”

Of all the things I’ve seen, I think the bigger big things are the ones I want to bite the most-not. Their noises are good, and when I bite things, noises stop.

I have a plan though. When the big things come around again, I’ll try to make as much noise as I can. The big things move fast, and if one held me and moved, I could get metal easier.

Until they show up again, though, I need to be careful. If I bite too many bright-soft-things, the dark-time soft things won’t have time to take them away.

If I keep looking until they show up again, then it will be better than absorbing iron from the red stuff.

As I look forward, about three bright-times pass before the big things show up. They are carrying with them a white and blue thing that they put next to the fallen core.

I swivel my spike limb to hit the dirt, making a noise and causing ground-stuff to fly up into a dry-fog.

“What the fuck was that?” I hear black-long noise.

I keep swiveling, and as I do, I hear the big things getting up. They move to me fast, and when I hear them close, I slow down my swivel.

“Oh. It’s that...scrap.”

I stop swiveling completely, and then I feel myself moving up. Success!

I am lens to lens with black-long now. Their mouth is tilted downwards and a line of soft above one of their lenses is raised above the other line. One of their soft-lines is missing a slit of soft, while the other has a small bead of metal.

I swivel one of my limbs towards the bead, but long-black jerks back and drops me. Short-yellow begins making a loud squeaky noise and starts to hunch over.

“Dude, shut up, it’s not funny, it went for my piercing.”

Dude continues to squeak, now rolling on the ground as they do so. Long-black heavily exhales before quickly swinging one of their lower limbs at Dude. The squealing stops, replaced with a low wheeze, and Dude rises from the ground, leaning down to pick me up as they do.

Dude is not holding me the way Long-black did. Instead, Dude is aiming me at Long-black. From slightly further away, I can gain more detail on Long-black. Long-black’s core is covered with a shiny black fabric, while its head has a fleshy attachment extending from both sides. The left attachment has another small metal bead. I swivel my core to more directly study the bead.

It is small, shiny and black, seemingly identical to the “piercing” in one of the lines of soft above its lenses. Long-black’s lenses move to me, focusing on my mouth. The downward curve of their mouth deepens.

I have only been in contact with the big things for a brief period, but I have already found much more metal then I would have gained from biting soft things. Now I only need to have them bring me towards more.


	2. Brass 1.2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It has been nineteen passings of bright and dark times since I have been picked up by the big things, and I’ve already gathered a large amount of valuable data, one of which being the proper name of the big things. They are, at least from what I’ve gathered, called “People.”

It has been nineteen passings of bright and dark times since I have been picked up by the big things, and I’ve already gathered a large amount of valuable data, one of which being the proper name of the big things. They are, at least from what I’ve gathered, called “People.”

It is an unsatisfying word to me. It is an empty word, devoid of value for anything but referring to People. From what I’ve gathered, it is not descriptive in any way. People simply means People, and nothing else.

What I’ve found from other People are their “names”, or what they are called. Long black is called “Evan” and Short yellow is “Sean”. Again, while these words mean nothing, they are more simple then the descriptive names I gave them.

I have also found that “Look” is not a name, but rather a word meant only as I use in words like “looking” : as a simple version of examine.

Evan and Sean seem to be companions of some sort, as they spend nearly all of their time together, usually staying at a damaged “house” near large sources of water, and more importantly, metal. Often times, Evan and Sean go totally motionless on large strips of soft material, and when they do so, I take the opportunity to assess my surroundings.

Near the pool of water, there are many pieces of metal of varying type. I have found large amounts of copper, steel, aluminium, and lead. After consuming only a few pieces, I was able to make my limbs much better. I now have six limbs, each with a non-smooth surface made up of seven thin rows of short spikes, allowing me to grip much more effectively.

While the desire to consume more metal is overwhelming, I have slowed my consumption considerably, as it seemed to cause Evan and Sean some amount of distress. Near the end of one dark-time, I made my way back into the house, only to find Sean consuming a small amount of water from his open grasping appendage.

Upon seeing me, they jerked their lower limbs suddenly, and struck me with the end of their limb, covered in a non consumable substance. Following this, I fell still, and began to consider how much distress responding with a bite might bring, but before I could reach a conclusion, Sean had seemed to flee, shutting the large, flat plane of core that divided the areas of the house.

I have not seen Sean or Evan in detail for twelve passings of the bright and dark times, but I have heard them noise at each other, secluded in their area of the house, though as of seven days ago, these noisings stopped as well. I have considered simply consuming the metal the plane swivels on, and then gripping the plane, and pulling it down, but I am still considering if such an action would only cause more distress.

Until then, I have been going each night to examine the metal, to see if I can find especially valuable material for later use. I have found a few such pieces so far, with the most notable being deep within the pool of water. Near the bottom of the pool, I found a damaged limb of a people coated in a non consumable blue substance, concealing a mixture of metals. I could detect steel, copper, gold, silver, tungsten, chromium, iron, boron, manganese, and sulphur.

The material would be quite useful, but it gave me further questions. Clearly, this limb’s presence means that people are capable of shedding their limbs, which is something I have yet to see Sean or Evan do, which brings me to believe it is an uncommon behavior for people to do. So why did the people who had shed their limb allow for such a valuable source of metal to be left in water, possibly leading to its corrosion?

After consuming the substance for analysis, I found something else confusing. There were large separated sections in the metal coating on the limb, and after processing, the sections had disappeared, and the metal shell of the limb was nearly twice the size that it had been before analysis. Why would a partially empty piece of material grow in size?

Confused, I consumed the metal again, only to discover that while the size had increased, and the density of each substance was constant, there was no more material then there had been before.

What could have caused such a strange thing to happen to this metal? It makes me feel as though it might be possibly harmful to consume the metal, even if I only used it to replace lower-quality material in my form.

So, using my limbs, I move large amounts of silica, brown core, and other debris, and hide the materials in their place. That way, I can ensure that the moving of the water will not disturb the position of the metal, and that the people the metal had formerly been a part of will not reclaim the material.

Satisfied, I locomote among the side of the pool’s walls, and breach the surface, and then retreat back to the house that Evan and Sean are in. After arriving, I find that the plane of material dividing the house into its sections is hanging from its swivel points, and looking into the room where I knew Sean and Evan had been dwelling, I see a dark-time sharp thing, more fully visible due to a fake-bright that lay on the floor.

It arches upwards, quickly expanding in size, making a loud noise like when Sean or Evan would “open a can of soda”, and stares at me with its shining yellow lenses. Before I can respond in any way, the dark-time sharp thing disappears through an opening in the side of the house. I quickly scan the section of the house, and return with no trace of Sean or Evan. This is concerning.


	3. Brass 1.3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I am now used to being alone again. While Sean and Evan were exceedingly useful for the occasional fragments of knowledge they would leave me, I have found a new source of information.

I am now used to being alone again. While Sean and Evan were exceedingly useful for the occasional fragments of knowledge they would leave me, I have found a new source of information.

It is a rectangular object, covered in a hard, non-consumable carapace I have now come to associate with people-made things. A thin rod of metal juts from its top, expelling nearly-unnoticeable pulses of data. Through this, it seems to be able to communicate with others of its kin, and some of its kin have very much to say.

I cannot understand what exactly most of it means. Many times, the only noising it produces is a sound like crumpling sheets of metal, coupled with a sharp screech. As far as I can tell, it is some fragment of the people’s language I cannot interpret. What little pieces I do understand are useful, however. I have found out that the area where I am located is called “Gloster” and that “All residents are advised to move inland and head for higher ground.”

This noising repeats very often. I usually hear it at least twelve times before the dark-time begins. I do not understand why the noiser is advising peoples to leave this location. The area we are in is completely flooded with water, which I know to be vital for biological creatures, as well as filled with valuable sources of metal, which is similarly vital for metallic creatures such as myself. Perhaps the noiser is hoping to keep all of these resources for their own use, but with my presence, they will find this goal of theirs thwarted.

With resources in mind, however, I have come to a conclusion. With the seeming emptiness of my surroundings, I no longer need to hold regard for stealth in matters of adaptation and growth. In fact, if I am to ever be in direct conflict with the noiser using the rectangular object, it might be best to prioritise such modification.

My first priority, as conflict seems possible, if not inevitable, is to grow to a more formidable size. While a smaller form is beneficial in terms of speed and dexterity, a larger form enables more robust limbs, as well as a larger base to work off of.

While I had come to the conclusion that the spherical shape I had first remembered was a useful one, this new form might need to be a longer shape. I have decided on a rhombus-like shape, with a large shell on top to defend my core, mouth, and secondary lenses, all of which I shall place on the bottom side.

This bottom side, while less durable then the shell, will still be resistant to nearly all harm that I have encountered so far. As such, it will be fairly safe to be left exposed to the ground. I had briefly considered aerial movement, but such an endeavor would likely be more of a waste of resources than it would be a boon in possible conflicts.

As for the placement of limbs and other vital organs, I have decided that two sets of stronger hind limbs should make up the main locomotive action, while another set will be used for manipulation. The manipulators are more specialised in design, as I have found flexibility to be important for manipulating limbs, and so they differ significantly from the locomoting limbs in structure.

The manipulating limbs will be positioned near my primary lens and my mouth for ease of examination of non-metallic objects and organisms, and in the case of the mouth’s use, shearing of objects and organisms, metallic or not.

The primary lens, unlike its secondary kin, will be integrated into the shell, with a retractable cover in order to protect it in times of conflict and allow regular examination otherwise. This should prevent a possible threat like the Noiser from attempting to exploit a weakness via destruction of my lenses, as well as prevent the possible scratching of the lens in rough conditions.

As for the mouth, I have had no issues with the previous design, and so will only enlarge it to fit the new form. Its interlocking sheets have little issue shearing through material as long as I ensure the sheets are made of durable enough material.

These plans are simple enough to execute, and with my limited resources I was able to begin to build a rudimentary version. I had yet to acquire the raw material to properly construct my form, but I had a good idea where to start. Only a few bright and dark times ago, I found a large blue house with a strange thing lodged into its top. It was large and smooth, with a thick triangular tail. This tail was far more rigid than any other I had seen before and had large fins, as well as a circular arrangement of blades attached to a short pseudo-fin jutting from the tail’s side.

On the thing’s head were three similar blades, but far larger. The reason I found such a thing important was how obviously metallic the thing’s body was, and with the way it was fully still, I imagined it was in some state of hibernation. While it was clearly a large predator of some kind, its sedentary nature provided me with advantages it could never have defended from.

I slowly move up the side of the house, using the now much thicker end spikes in my limbs to dig into the smooth substance that constituted its walls. After reaching the top, I stop for a brief period to study my subject. The thing’s great size was even more obvious from a close-up perspective.

I find it difficult to imagine being able to defeat such a thing, even though I fully understand the large advantage I held over other things, metallic or not.

I slowly begin to climb the thing, being careful not to puncture its shell as I do. While climbing, I find that it is mostly made up of aluminium, but in specific areas, like where the top blades meet its body, there is also titanium, nickel, and even tungsten.

Deciding to start there, I curl a limb around the base of the limb connecting to the blades and twist my limb while absorbing the material at the base. The long limb creaks, and then falls, its blades clattering against the smooth ground below, with one of the blades snapping with a loud noise of splintering and breaking.

…And yet aside from the initial fall of its limb, the thing didn't move. Perhaps it was like when I bit something and it went still, so still that it never moved again. With this thought in mind, I begin to consume the thing starting at the end of its tail, discarding what was unusable. The most prominent among the unusable substances were large amounts of the non-consumable shell that so many objects seemed to be sheathed in.

In addition to the directly unusable material, I discard a large amount of common aluminium, retaining only a small amount for use in manipulating limbs. While the gathered material is not perfectly ideal, I did obtain a small amount of tungsten. Still, it is not enough for what I have planned.

The only other source of tungsten I have detected so far is in the discarded limb that I had hidden. Besides its metallic composition, its properties are unknown to me, meaning it is possibly dangerous.

And yet I am left with very few options. Resolving myself, I leave the house the thing had stilled on top of and begin to move towards the pool with the limb.


End file.
